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Only the original technology, id tech 3 (quake 3) which powered all those games has been GPL'ed. The derivative games are still closed. Actually, there are quake3 and enemy territory mods which are still closed source to this day, like Urban Terror for Q3 and True Combat for enemy territory. id tech 4 will definitely be GPL'ed, probably announced this quakecon, but i dont know about the derivative games from it. (quake 4, ETWQ, etc)

From my understanding the release of code for RTCW:ET isn't "Open Source" by the definition of the term. It doesn't include all the code for it, just parts of it IIRC. And also the license prohibits things like commercial use of it. That makes it not Open Source according to the official OSI Open Source definition.

i was wondering about when Id software would release the game engine as GPL or LGPL... and i was wondering about the features that could be released, like megatexture as used in ETQW...

Cheers

The only timeline I've seen was "sometime after the last game is released" the last game being the new Wolfenstein game. Also remember that if someone licenses the engine after the release of the Wolfenstein game and before the gpl release, Carmack will be polite and wait a while longer (as he did when id tech 3 was released under the gpl).

Megatexture is available in Doom 3 but is more Proof of Concept than anything else<1>. You'd have to do a lot of work to make it a viable alternative to tiled terrain. The real question should be how much of the sound architecture will be ripped out because of the deal with Creative?